


Cocky Little Shit

by DiscontentedWinter



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Break Up, But eventual make up, F/M, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Pre-Slash, Sheriff Stilinski's Name is John, mostly - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-20
Updated: 2018-05-20
Packaged: 2019-05-09 06:15:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,307
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14710655
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DiscontentedWinter/pseuds/DiscontentedWinter
Summary: John Stilinski is a troublemaker. Sheriff Gajos takes a chance on him anyway, and so does his daughter, Claudia.





	Cocky Little Shit

**Author's Note:**

> This one is for @sterekislovely on Tumblr, who prompted me to write this!

 

“Cocky little shit!” the grocery store security guard yells as John skates past the “No Skateboarding” sign on the sidewalk and shows the guy his middle finger. John’s been hanging out here for a few weeks now with his buddies, and the security guard wants to _murder_ them. It’s funny as hell.

John does another pass, and thinks about dropping his jeans to moon the guard as well, but he’s caused enough of a distraction already. Enough for Rick to sneak out of the store with a bag of chips under his shirt anyhow.

John and Donny and Rick hang out around the grocery store most afternoons. Sometimes they go to the mall, but the mall in Beacon Hills is kind of lame, or at least John’s experiences of it are, since their security guards can actually run. So he and his buddies hang out here instead. A few blocks back from the grocery store there’s a vacant lot that nobody seems to own, and they end up there a lot, eating chips and talking shit as the afternoons wind slowly down into night.

When it’s dark, John walks home with his skateboard tucked under his arm.

He stands for a while on the front porch of his house, the boards sagging under his feet, before he pushes the door open.

The TV is blaring in the living room.

John treads down the hallway to the kitchen. His mother is chopping vegetables by the sink. She looks up as he enters the room. The bags under her eyes make her look ghoulish.

“Don’t upset your father,” she says.

John nods, then grabs a couple of slices of bread from the loaf on the counter and goes to his room to eat them. The noise from the television vibrates through the thin walls.

 _Don’t upset your father._ That’s code for _He’s angry tonight_.

John sets his skateboard down, and crouches on the floor where his tape player’s plugged in. He finds his headphones, and jams the socket in.

He closes his eyes, and turns the volume up so loud that he can’t hear the TV anymore.

 _You’ll ruin your hearing,_ his mom always chides.

He gets so angry sometimes though, that this is the only way he can be in this stifling little house, stuck between his mom’s weary misery and his dad’s explosive temper. So he puts his headphones on, and cranks the volume all the way up, and listens to _Kiss Off_ by The Violent Femmes.

 

***

 

John’s jeans are torn and his knees are bleeding. Turns out the security guard at the grocery store can run faster than John gave him credit for. He’d tackled John as John was bolting out the door, and they’d both landed on the pavement. The bag of chips in John’s waistband had exploded with a pop, and now his underwear is full of salt and crushed chips.

John hasn’t been inside the Sheriff’s Department before. He’s sitting on a bench outside the sheriff’s office, one wrist cuffed to the slats. His knees are stinging, and he really wants to pick the crumbs out of his underwear, but he’s in full view of the bullpen.

He’s also kind of shit scared, and trying his hardest not to show it.

He looks up when the door to the sheriff’s office opens, and the security guard from the store lumbers past, his face like thunder. And then the sheriff is standing in the doorway.

“Lieberman,” he says, and the deputy who drove John here from the grocery store gets up from his desk in the bullpen and comes over and unfastens John’s cuff. The sheriff motions for John to stand, and then looks him up and down. “Come in here, son.”

John shuffles inside the sheriff’s office, his heart thumping wildly in his ribs, trailing crumbs behind him.

The sheriff is middle-aged, with a receding hairline and a network of fine wrinkles expanding out from the corners of his eyes like cracks in a windshield. He’s tall, and lanky, and he has the beginnings of a paunch that pushes against his uniform shirt.

“Sit down,” he says.

John sits, grimacing at the sensation of chip fragments in his ass crack.

The sheriff sits on the other side of his desk, and looks down at the report in front of him, then up and John, and then back to his report.

“Janusz,” he says. “Janusz Noah Stilinski.”

He pronounces it perfectly, and John sneaks a look at the nameplate on his desk. Sheriff Mitch Gajos. Probably explains why _Janusz_ was no problem for him.

“It’s John,” John says, his voice smaller than he wants.

“John,” Sheriff Gajos repeats. “How old are you, John?”

John swallows. “Twelve.”

“Twelve.” Sheriff Gajos shakes his head.

John feels a rush of bravado. “I’m not scared of jail!”

“Well then,” Sheriff Gajos says, “that’s good, because guess where you’ll end up if you keep shoplifting?”

John’s heart races.

“You’re lucky I’m a betting man, John,” Sheriff Gajos says, “and that I feel like taking a gamble on you.”

Which is how John finds himself in the back parking lot of the station, a soapy bucket of water in one hand and a sponge in the other, washing every police cruiser in the place.

When he finishes, Sheriff Gajos tells him to come back next week.

 

***

 

“Don’t upset your father,” his mother says to John as he slouches inside the house, and John nods and heads for his room to listen to his music. He has to turn it up as loud as he can to drown out the sounds of his dad yelling when the meatloaf is undercooked.

 

***

 

John doesn’t fall out with Rick and Donny over that winter, but he falls away from them. He doesn’t get to see them much because he spends every Saturday at the Sheriff’s Department. At first he turns up because he’s afraid that otherwise Sheriff Gajos is going to tell his parents what he got caught doing, or that he’s going to tell the security guard to press charges after all, but eventually he _likes_ it. It’s warmer than hanging out in a vacant lot every day, and Sheriff Gajos always seems to have a couple of jobs lined up for him.

He still drags his feet and glowers when Sheriff Gajos talks to him, afraid that if he doesn’t he’ll reveal something about himself that he instinctively needs to protect. He still backtalks too, but Sheriff Gajos usually replies with a bored-sounding “Uh huh” and passes the bucket and sponge to him.

One day, when he walks in, there’s a girl about his age sitting on the bench outside the sheriff’s office. She’s wearing a shirt with polka dots on it, and pink shorts that come to her knees. She has dark hair, tiny dark moles dotted on her pale skin like sprinkles on a cupcake, and an easy, broad smile when she turns her head and sees John standing there.

“Hi,” she says brightly.

“Hi.” John shuffles his feet, and then blurts out, “What did you do?”

She wrinkles her nose. “What d’you mean?”

And then the door to the sheriff’s office opens, and Sheriff Gajos appears. “Ah,” he says. “John, this is Claudia, my daughter.”

John looks at his feet. “Oh.”

Claudia bursts out laughing. “Did you think I was under _arrest_?”

John wants to tell her to shut up, but her dad is right there. He shuffles his feet again.

“Dad!” Claudia exclaims. “He thinks I’m a bad seed!”

Sheriff Gajos rescues him. “How about you get started washing the cars, John?”

John flees, his face burning.

 

***

 

John has a growth spurt in the summer, and outgrows his clothes. His jeans suddenly don’t reach his ankles, and even when he tucks the cuffs into his socks they keep popping out again. His mom sighs and clicks her tongue, and drags him to Sears to get some new ones.

“I like your jeans,” Claudia says the next Saturday at the station. She’s wearing her Girl Scouts uniform—a green skirt, a shirt, and a green vest over it—and swinging her legs as she sits on the bench outside her dad’s office.

“Thanks,” John says. He’s not sure how to take Claudia. She doesn’t seem to notice that he doesn’t like her. She just keeps talking to him anyway, and laughing when he scowls, or flips someone off. He hesitates now, and sits beside her. “I like your, um, your patches on your vest.”

Claudia smiles widely, and pokes at one. “This is my newest. I got it for camping. We went out into the Preserve.” Her smiles transforms into something a little bit evil, and her eyes brighten. “I got in trouble for scaring everyone with that story, you know, with the guy with the hook for a hand, and he’s banging on the roof of the car, and it turns out it’s the boyfriend’s head. Everyone screamed.” She snorts. “Dumbasses.”

John laughs too.

Maybe Claudia’s not that bad.

 

***

 

“I like it here,” Claudia says on Saturday, when they’re washing the cars. She tosses her sponge in the bucket, and it lands with a heavy plop, splashing water onto John’s legs. “We used to live in Arizona. Arizona sucks.”

“Why?”

“There was a girl in my class who put gum in my hair,” Claudia says. “So, okay, that’s not the whole of Arizona, but Tiffany was a bitch and I’m glad we moved here.”

“You should have punched her in the face,” John suggests.

“I don’t think that would have helped.”

John shrugs, and scrubs at the grill of the sheriff’s cruiser.

It’s weird to have a friend who is a girl, but who isn’t a girlfriend. Like, that was okay back when he was a little kid, but John is thirteen now. Rick has a girlfriend. Even Donny does, even though nobody has met her and he says she lives in Canada. Rick says that he got to second base with his girlfriend, and John thinks that means boobs, and earlier today he took a surreptitious glance at Claudia’s chest, and she doesn’t really seem to have any? Her shirt is pretty baggy, and it’s kind of hard to tell.

“Will you teach me to ride your skateboard?” Claudia asks suddenly.

“Where?” Sheriff Gajos won’t be happy if John goes back to the grocery store.

Claudia gestures to the parking lot. “Why not here?”

Why not?

 

***

 

Claudia skins both knees, splits her chin open, and chips a tooth.

Sheriff Gajos threatens to toss John’s skateboard in the nearest dumpster if he ever lets Claudia on it again.

It takes about two weeks before they disregard him.

 

***

 

When John is fourteen, he and Claudia kiss for the first time, underneath the water tower at the edge of town.

John guesses that he has a girlfriend now.

 

***

 

John’s never been that talkative, but Claudia makes up for it. They hang out in the Preserve a lot, lying on the bank of the creek that runs through the woods, Claudia chattering like a bird. John likes listening to her. She’s funny, and she’s smart, and she lets him get to second base and then pretends not to notice how he’s tenting his jeans, and gives him time to adjust himself.

Claudia talks about everything and nothing, and tells terrible jokes that make John groan aloud. She makes him a mixtape, and he makes one for her as well, listening avidly to the radio one night and trying to hit record at exactly the right moment to cut off the announcer, but not miss too much of the intro to the song.

He gives it to her at the station one Saturday, and Sheriff Gajos sees and beckons him into his office.

“You’re a good kid, John,” he says sternly. “You remember how we first met?”

“Yeah.”

“That security guard was pissed when I told him to get out of here,” Sheriff Gajos says, shaking his head with a rueful smile. “A cocky little shit, he called you.”

John rolls his eyes.

“And he wasn’t wrong, was he?”

John shrugs. “Whatever.”

“I took a gamble on you,” Sheriff Gajos continues. “I like you, John Stilinski. And as long as you’re not a cocky little shit when it comes to Claudia, we’re good. If you want to date my daughter, then that means you stay on the straight and narrow. Understand?”

John nods, and turns to leave.

“Oh, and John?” Sheriff Gajos raises his eyebrows. “Age of consent in California is eighteen. Don’t either of you forget it.”

John flees.

 

***

 

When John is fifteen, Claudia breaks up with him. There’s a boy she likes in her history class. He’s not like John. That’s what she says.

“He’s not like you, John.”

Like there’s something wrong with him. John sneers.

“He’s…” Her forehead creases. The wind blows her hair around her face. “He’s _happy_. I wish that… I wish that you could be happy too.”

 

***

 

John’s going to get out of Beacon Hills. As soon as he’s eighteen, he’s going to join the army, and maybe he’ll see the world. Maybe he’ll only see it as far as Fort Jackson too, but at least it will be out of here. He hates being stuck living with his parents, like every minute he’s in that house feels like someone dragging their nails down a chalkboard.

He sits on the top of the old railway bridge, taking swigs from the bottle of tequila he stole from his dad’s cabinet.

He’s going to see the world, and he’s never coming back to Beacon Hills.

He turns the volume up on his Walkman, blasting REM’s _The End of the World As We Know It_ through his already-throbbing skull.

He doesn’t even know the police cruiser is there until Sheriff Gajos has already climbed up the embankment and is suddenly there, one hand on John’s shoulder to make sure he doesn’t fall forward, and the other pulling his headphones off.

John takes another swig of tequila, and Sheriff Gajos doesn’t move to stop him. Just watches him with those wide brown eyes of his, and an expression on his face that John is too drunk to interpret.

“Leave me alone,” John mutters. “I don’t need your help.”

“Where’d you get the walkman, John?” Sheriff Gajos asks. “Because the Best Buy over on Elm is missing one, and one of the kids who works there saw you in there earlier.”

“Fuck you,” John says tiredly. He just wants to listen to his music, is all. So loud that it drowns out everything in Beacon Hills.

Sheriff Gajos hauls him to his feet, and down the steep embankment to the road. He shoves him into the back of his cruiser, and drives him to the station.

“Sober up, you idiot,” he says when he puts John in a cell, and John realizes it’s the first time in everything John had done that he’s heard Sheriff Gajos sound angry with him.

 

***

 

No drinking, no smoking, no stealing.

Those are the rules if John wants to keep washing the cars at the station.

He tells Sheriff Gajos to go to hell.

He drinks, he smokes, he steals.

He backtalks.

“Don’t upset your father,” his mom reminds him, and John says, loud enough to be heard over the sound of the TV in the front room: “Fuck him. I don’t care.”

 

 

***

 

The shattered glass sparkles like icicles in the white shag rug, blue and red lights flash and flicker against the window, and John blinks and thinks of Christmas. Blood as bright red as the berries on holly spreads around him.

“They were arguing, and he fell,” his mom says. “John fell onto the glass table.”

John thinks he’s been falling since the day he was born.

At the hospital, Sheriff Gajos asks him again, and John says, “I fell. Jesus. Why do you keep _asking_ me?”

He hates his dad so much he doesn’t even know why he lies to protect him.

He remembers when he was twelve, pretending not to show how scared he was because he was afraid that if he did it would reveal some secret truth about him, something that he needed to keep hidden in order to be able to face the world.

It feels a little like that.

“When you’re up for it,” Sheriff Gajos says, a hand on John’s shoulder, “come back and clean the cars.”

John rolls his eyes, but he nods.

 

***

 

When John is eighteen, he joins the army. He leaves Beacon Hills. As he’s climbing on the bus, he sees Claudia again, driving past in that blue Jeep she just bought from the used lot on Lincoln Street. The stereo is blaring _Beyond the Wheel_ by Soundgarden, and John likes to imagine that Claudia’s just going to keep driving, that she’s going to get out of Beacon Hills just like he is, even though she’s not running from anything.

She writes to him when he’s gone, and tells him about college, and the friends she’s making and the movies she’s seeing. She sends him a mix-tape every week when he’s in Iraq, even though the mail isn’t always regular and sometimes they arrive out of order, or a bunch at once.

She writes, _Will you ever come back to Beacon Hills?_

 

***

 

John is twenty-two when he gets out of the army. He’s twenty-three and a graduate of the police academy in Fresno when he returns to Beacon Hills. He doesn’t tell his parents he’s home. He books into a cheap hotel room on the outskirts of town, and drives to Sheriff Gajos’s house that evening.

“Jesus Christ,” Sheriff Gajos says when he opens the door. “Look at you!” He pulls John into a hug, right there on the front porch. “What the hell are you doing back here?”

“Looking for a job,” John says.

Sheriff Gajos ushers him inside. “Janucz Stilinski isn’t a common name. I gotta say, I was a little surprised when I got a fax from the academy down in Fresno asking for a character reference.”

“Thanks for giving me one.”

“You just assumed I wouldn’t tank your career right then and there, huh?” Sheriff Gajos asks. He shakes his head and snorts. "You always did have more bad attitude than sense.” 

“I was right, wasn’t I?” John asks with a grin.

“Yeah, you were, you cocky little shit.” Sheriff Gajos claps him on the back. “So you came all the way back here to ask me for a job as a deputy, did you?”

John’s attention is caught by Claudia coming down the stairs. She’s wearing her UCLA sweatshirt, a pair of ripped jeans, and no shoes. She’s never looked more beautiful.

“That’s not the only reason I came back,” John admits, and Claudia’s smile lights up the entire world.

 

***

 

 _“I wish that…”_ Claudia said, years ago now, when John was just a dumb, angry teenager. _“I wish that you could be happy too.”_

He tries to turn the key in the lock of the California bungalow on Maple Street, and it jams. “It’s stuck!”

“Put some muscle into it,” Claudia yells from the driveway, hauling a box out of the Jeep.

“I don’t want to break it.”

“John, you’d better have that door open by the time I get there. I want to be carried over the threshold, not crawl through a window.”

“It’s—” John wiggles the key, and this time it turns and he’s able to open the door. “Got it.”

Claudia sets down the box on the front step, and bounces from foot to foot. She holds out her arms. “Okay, now do the thing!”

John laughs, and sweeps her up into a bridal carry, and carries her inside.

He’s happy now. He’s happy too.


End file.
